Japanese Patent Application No. JP-A-2000-326588 describes a related-art image forming apparatus which includes a sheet housing unit for stacking and housing a recording sheet generally upright in the vertical direction, which is fed to an image forming unit, and a cover supported to be capable of being opened and closed on the upper portion of the sheet housing unit. The cover is closed to cover an upper end side of the housed recording sheet.
Such a configuration allows the recording sheet to be housed upright in the sheet housing unit by supplying (housing) it from the upper end side of the recording sheet. This makes it possible to reduce the size of the sheet housing unit in the horizontal direction. In other words, this makes it possible to reduce the footprint of the overall image forming apparatus on, for example, a desktop.
Moreover, the image forming apparatus described in JP-A-2000-326588 includes the cover which opens and closes the sheet housing unit on the upper end side of a recording sheet, and this configuration allows for a reduction in size of the sheet housing unit in the horizontal direction.
To reliably feed recording sheets, it is advantageous to provide a push member which pushes a recording sheet toward a pick-up roller which takes the recording sheet out of the sheet housing unit.
However, when compared with an image forming apparatus in which sheets are supplied from a side of the image forming apparatus, an opening portion through which a recording sheet is placed tends to be narrower in the image forming apparatus with a sheet housing unit which accommodates generally vertical sheets. Thus, since the push member is supplied in the sheet feeding unit, it is difficult to supply recording sheets in the presence of the push member in the sheet housing unit, because the presence of the push member hinders the recording sheets from being received.
Thus, implementing a push member in the narrower recording sheet space of a vertical sheet feeding image forming apparatus causes a difficulty in that recording sheets are hindered from being easily put into the sheet holding unit.